Call of Cthulhu

Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu represents an interesting adaption of the mythological Lovecraftian Cthulhu myth literature. Sandy Petersen has managed to forge a chilling scenario and avoided the usual pitfalls, like stereotypical characters and unusable rules from which many other RPGs lack notoriously. While the rule set is kept simple, the game manages to exploit the horror genres' best ingredients: fear, chill and athmosphere - given game masters (called Keepers) and players are capable of maintaining it. Athmosphere is like a thin pane of glass - both, fragile, but very precious.

Unlike many other RPGs, where the player characters are powerful, influential people, Cthulhu player characters are not. PCs are lesser beings, vermins at best, compared to the Greater Beings lurking in the endless depths of time and space. The earlier the PCs recognize this fact, the better for them. While collecting more and more skills and, above all, knowledge and insight, all they actually accumulate is insanity. Each step they make brings them closer to the personal abyss, that is, a mind-wrenching state of pure chaos. The worst thing about it is that there is no way out of it: you simply cannot fight gods and beings who dwell the Earth for zillions of years, eat up whole civilizations for breakfast and leap between galaxies with baseball bats and shot guns.